Miller’s Farewell: “Sad to Leave My Professional Home”

On her Web site, Judith Miller has now posted the text of the goodbye letter she’s scheduled to publish in tomorrow’s New York Times.

In it, Miller describes herself “sad to leave my professional home.” She also says that she desired to set the record straight on weapons-of-mass-destruction coverage before the Times ever published its 2004 editors’ note on the subject:

At a commencement speech I delivered at Barnard College in 2003, a year before that note was published, I asked whether the administration’s prewar W.M.D. intelligence was merely wrong, or was it exaggerated or even falsified. I believed then, and still do, that the answer to bad information is more reporting. I regret that I was not permitted to pursue answers to the questions I raised at Barnard. Their lack of answers continues to erode confidence in both the press and the government.

She also writes: “The right of reply and the obligation to correct inaccuracies are…the mark of a free and responsible press.”

And she concludes by stating her resolve to “call attention to the internal and external threats to our country’s freedoms–Al Qaeda and other forms of religious extremism, conventional and W.M.D. terrorism, and growing government secrecy in the name of national security–subjects that have long defined my work. ”